Comment by pnathan
11 years ago
Kind of obvious question that hasn't been asked yet - what happened to the IP? Any chance it could be open sourced? (Would it even be pointful to open source it today?)
11 years ago
Kind of obvious question that hasn't been asked yet - what happened to the IP? Any chance it could be open sourced? (Would it even be pointful to open source it today?)
It vanished into a lawyer's basement, and so passed out of history. 10+ years of work, gone. NOT THAT I'M BITTER OR ANYTHING.
Open sourcing it's probably not useful: it was based almost entirely on tribal knowledge, passed from developer to developer, and learning curve was pretty steep. I worked on our translator for a while, porting it to new CPU backends, and... yuck.
However, please try; somewhere in that lawyer's basement is a short story which I wrote in my lunch break, emailed to a friend, shortly before the company went bust... and I forgot to send a copy to my personal account. And my friend lost it. I want that back, dammit.
That's just revolting.
How large was the core Taos kernel and basic userland? What kind of effort do you estimate would be needed to bootstrap a libre clone? Have any people ever considered doing this before?
TAOS was tiny; but it had no features. It had the VP1 loader, memory allocator, filesystem interface, a really horrible shell, and that was about it. It may have had threads. It certainly didn't have TCP/IP. It'd fit comfortably inside a 64kB DOS .COM file, because that's how we booted it.
Elate/intent was way, way bigger. It was a proper filesystem, with device drivers (object-oriented and named and mounted in the VFS), and modules and components and a package manager (which was actually pretty awesome) and Posix and a huge standard library. Even the translator was big, by which I mean double-digit kilobytes of translated code.
I would say it's not worth cloning. State of the art in JITs has moved on so much that intent's fairly crude binary translation's not worth much. Instead I'd use something like LuaJIT as a JIT core, and build up from there; it's fast, tiny by modern standards (although still way bigger than the intent core), and you get binary portability by pushing Lua bytecode around instead. Compiling C into FFI-heavy LuaJIT shouldn't be too terrible and should give decent performance, while keeping portability.
...
Incidentally, despite my previous message, it may be possible that Amiga Anywhere still has an intent license. Which means they might have source code (because it's not like they're going to get builds from Tao any more). Does anyone know if Amiga Anywhere is still a thing?
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IP Lawyer by the name Peter Ritz iirc. He tried to recruit Andy Henson, Andy Stout and me to revive it.